Thursday, February 4, 2016

Aradia: Gospel of the Witches, Now Available!




At long last the Aradia, Leland's most important work, is available from yours truly.

Unlike most of my releases, this one is almost more science and history than strict occultism- as an anthropological study (albeit one with some controversy behind it) it focuses on both the dogma and rituals of certain groups in Tuscany during this pre-modern period which practiced a sort of folkish witchcraft as part of what we might consider a pagan, Romanized religious cult.

Indeed, Leland claims it is this pagan group, and not christianity, that was dominant at the time; we may be seeing, in my opinion, here, Leland conflating a folkish tendency among the population with a wider religious force- this would make sense, since not long after this era both the Italians and Germans began openly adopting folkishness in an ubermensch sort of manner.

The rituals become less difficult to understand when compared to some of the other ritualism mentioned in grimoires from before this period- the permeability of the French and Italian cultures of this age would have allowed a great deal of knowledge to pass from the enormous corpus of French literature through the Italian cycle which itself was quite large.

It should be noted that while modern Wiccans credit this as a work describing their own movement it is far closer in form to genuine neopaganism in the European sense than to Wicca.

No comments:

Post a Comment